"employers have the upper hand again"

Hopefully, none of this is a surprise to you. If it is, I imagine it's like being tossed out of a warm bed into a bathtub of ice water.

Key topics:

✔️ By the time someone on an MSM outlet is "allowed" to publish anything bordering on truth, it's too damn late. Sorry. 🤷🏻‍♀️
✔️The key is to recognize the market changes quickly and remain nimble.
✔️ It's not pleasant to acknowledge that a boom cycle is finished, but failing to do so puts you at risk.


Links:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/07/employees-employers-upper-hand-small-business

https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2023/05/10/hopefully-you-saw-this-coming/

https://thejobmarketjournal.com/


Links where I can be found: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2023/01/30/updates-housekeeping/

Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

Transcript

Unknown: 0:15

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. And now, here's your host, Sara Causey, Hello, Hello, and thanks for tuning in now hope you enjoy the funny cheeky music that played you in. That is actually the same person who does the intro and the outro. And the little bumper, I have some times about where I publish and how to find me. And when I heard it for the first time, the other day, I genuinely laughed out loud. I thought this is perfect. Because what we wanted to do was come up with something that is funny. It's tongue in cheek, it's meant to get some chuckles because I talked about some heavy topics on this podcast at times the economy. crony capitalism, collusion, the crashing of the job market, the hyper elites and the fat cats that benefit from the misery and the mistakes of other people, et cetera. And I'm like, there's gotta be some way to inject some humor into all of this. And I had been thinking like, Man, if I won the Powerball, it would be so cool to get Randy Travis to record a version of I told you, so that's like, Sarah told you. So she didn't warn you. I can't afford that. So in the absence of like a Mega Millions and being able to hire a celebrity, I went to him, it was like, I know, you'll be funny. It would be comedic and satirical to do something like that. Because, I mean, it is what it is gang, I did tell you, I have been warning you. And whenever my predictions get vindicated, I mean, it's typically not good news. Because I haven't been predicting good news. It's my hope, that maybe there will be some Hail Mary pass, maybe a miracle I I don't know. But I'm not seeing the evidence of it. Going all the way back to April 4 of last year, at a time when most commentators, especially the people, that you saw and heard on social media platforms that had anything to do with recruiting, staffing, HR, etcetera, they were still pushing the great resignation, everything is fine workers have the upper hand, if you don't twist yourself into a pretzel to accommodate them, you're not going to be able to hire anybody. And there was really this, in my opinion, overblown characteristic to it all, as if the band is going to play on forever, the great resignation will last forever, people will be able to hippity hop all across the job market, and they will get increasing amounts of money every single time they jump. And this will just go on forever, there's apparently going to be no into it. And when I started to see not only what I felt was just general misinformation, General, bad analysis, but putting such a level of hyperbole on it. I was deeply concerned about that. And I've talked about it on my blogs, and on this podcast many times, if you just cool off and take a step back and look at it rationally, you understand? Does it seem reasonable that someone would be able to hop across the job market every three to six months for the rest of their life? And then always, in that period of time, get more money every time they leap? Does that seem rational to you? Because to me, it doesn't seem rational. And I don't think that you have to be a staffing and recruiting subject matter expert or a job market expert or an economist or whatever, to take that step back and say, No, we're gonna go ahead and take a wild guess that probably this phenomenon is not going to continue on unbridled forever. And I've even drawn it out. Let's say that someone starts out at 60k and then makes a move for 70 and then for 80, and then for 90 and then for 100. And they just keep even if we want to say 10k Pay bumps every time they move. What are they going to do move so many times that they're finally making five $5 million. Let's be real, let's be real. And some of that hippity hopping for more money that took place was happening in big tech and in Silicon Valley. Where have we seen layoff after layoff after layoff after hiring freeze after Pip, after there's the door, feel free to walk out. As I've warned before, it's not solely big tech, and it's not solely Silicon Valley. That just seems to be where the crack in the pavement showed up the quickest. And it was not a pleasant experience for the people that had to go through that. And unfortunately, that fissure has spread through the rest of the economy. And even these industries that were purported to be safe and growing and fairly insulated from a recession. They're experiencing layoffs now too, as well as hiring freezes. And people being told there's gonna be a bonus this year, you're not gonna get any pay raises, we need to put a moratorium on this, that and the other. If you want a job, then you'll stay here and you'll put up with it. Otherwise, good luck. Because corporate America knows what's really going on. See, they don't get on social media, these CEOs, these fat cats, these hyperlinks, the power brokers, the cronies, the people that really pull the strings and have control over what happens in this country. They don't go on social media or on LinkedIn, for God's sakes, and listen to so called influencers and hype beasts that are trying to tell you a bunch of nonsense. They know better, they're not if they listen to that. It's for comedy. It's for chuckles It's looking at how uninformed the unwashed masses are. The serfs are so ignorant, they deserve what's coming to them because if they really cared enough, they take the time to figure out what the hell is actually going on. Clearly they don't they'd rather watch people on Tik Tok say, you can hip hop across the job market forever. And you always get more money and everything's cool. Right? So I, I endeavored to be a voice of dissent. It made some people mad, but I don't care. I'm not for that. If you need to have fluffy lies told you if you want bullshit spoon fed to you please go somewhere else. Because this is not the place for you. You have clearly tuned in to the wrong broadcast, if that's what you're looking for. Going all the way back to April 4 of last year, when all those bullshit artists were hyped up, and they were telling you it was gonna go on forever and ever and ever. I told you no. I told you no. And what I said in that blog post when the pendulum swings, just as the pendulum will swing away from being an extreme seller's market with buyers willing to waive inspections over bid offer based on photos without even going to the house, etc. This will happen with the job market as well. It's only a matter of time. I warned you about that more than a year ago. And I have been passionately sounding the alarm ever since. I mean, we're coming up soon, on a years worth of Saturday broadcasts. I will be excited at some point to get my Saturday's back and to not be recording every single day. And putting that information out. I mean, at some point, things will stabilize or at some point enough people will have woken up to reality, they're gonna know that we're in a shitstorm. And so the point of trying to warn them a shitstorm is coming will be irrelevant. Really, in a lot of ways. I think it already is because if somebody's not awake, if they're still not getting it yet, they're still LARPing. They're still playing, they've got their head and they're behind. I've I don't know what it's going to take. I mean, it probably something very cataclysmic or something highly personal. Like the cliche I've quoted many times when the guy down the street loses his job. It's a recession. But when I lose my job, it's an economic depression. I think as more people have a personal experience where they get turned down on the job market, and they realize that indeed, no, we don't have a 3.4% unemployment rate. And there are not two legitimate open jobs that pay a living wage for every one unemployed person. Not everybody has bills and monetary expenses each month that can be covered by being a burrito maker at Chipotle or a barista at Starbucks. It is absurd to assume that fast food joints and coffee houses will hire everybody that gets laid off from white collar knowledge work. I mean, the crap that we hear in mainstream media idea is so bad, I'm so burned out on it. I think that's why for me, I'm at a point of pay, if you don't get it, you're not gonna you're not going to get it, you're probably going to get steamrolled. And that sucks. But that's more than likely going to be your reality. And that is very sad. Speaking of which, if you had relied on the mainstream media to tell you that the pendulum was swinging, and that the times they were changing, you would be way behind the curve. An article finally appeared over on the Guardian, on May 7. So more than a year past the point when I said, Hey, wait, come on up. Time start paying attention, y'all. market is changing. It is coming up. They're gonna come in. I sure did. And I told you so more than a year later, when the economy is. The job market is even worse. You're finally being told by someone on the Guardian, the brief age of the worker is over. Employers have the upper hand again. Oh, really, you don't say? The byline reads the pandemic ushered in an era of quiet quitting and bare minimum Mondays, but workers have since lost leverage. And they show this very dystopian photo, it looks like something that would have been out of the old silent movie metropolis. It's just this big, garish hunk of machine with people going in and out of it. It seems that it was only yesterday that the media was filled with stories about workers calling the shots. It seems like it was only yesterday, because pretty much it was the mainstream media, as well as the BS artists on social media. And I'm going to really call out the hot air and hopium crowd on LinkedIn more than any place. They kept the narrative going, and going and going. Remember, labor shortage. Nobody wants to work. Gen Z is lazy. All men have gone home refused to work. Oh, we heard it and heard it, and heard it and heard it. And it just made me want to vomit. But it's like this idea of all of these young generations are lazy and an entire category of men have decided to opt out of working. They're living in grandma's basement. They're couchsurfing like Jeff Spicoli. They all have girlfriends that somehow are working and have means and the girlfriends are allowing them to live on the couch all day and smoke dope and pop pills and not work those narratives and send me hate mail if you want. I don't give a damn, we're past the point of partisan politics. If you're still playing that game, you are also going to get steamrolled by what's coming. And I don't care if that makes you mad. In fact, I hope it does. I hope it does. Because if you're still in some fantasy land, my guy's going to fix it all. The neocon the Neo lib these people who are all piggies that feed out of the same trough of slop, that guy is going to fix it. Right, right bang up job so far, real proud, God. But see those narratives of lazy, unmotivated, pill popper, drug taker, scum of the earth? Those narratives appeal a lot to the neocon side of things because they like to worship corporate America. For the life of me, I don't know why but they do. On the other side, on the Neo lib side, they want to worship the state, corporate America evil, but somehow their cronies and the people that fund them and support them and protect them on Capitol Hill are all great, and they're gonna solve the problems. Makes no sense. zippity doo da for me. This hot air and hopium crowd boy they kept the narrative going, kept it going. This is going to go on forever. It is a it is a permanent change. remote work is going to last forever work from anywhere is going to last forever. Employees having the upper hand is going to last forever. And I sat back and thought God no, it's not. God. No, no, no, no, no. One of the things I like about Scott Walters channel is he talks about the bubble in real estate and how he knew whenever Realtors were declared essential workers so that they could continue selling houses and stimulate the economy and keep the artificially manipulated bubble inflating going higher and higher. He knew this is not gonna last. There is no way that we can sit on the beach and just sell houses remotely and cashed the checks forever, that's just not going to happen. This is going to be a fun ride and a way to stack some cash while it's going on. But when the bubble pops, and it always does, it is going to be painful. I've been through it myself with the oil and gas market several times in my lifetime, you have to make hay while the sun shines and save your money. I have seen so many people in oil and gas wash out, they would take that money when the market was good, and you could make money hand over fist, and they would get trucks and boats and RVs and mansion, all of this stuff, just stuff. And then whenever the oil market went bust, the repo man would be busy. The boats gone, the trucks gone, the RV is gone, we're getting foreclosed on going to have to start over probably going to have to declare bankruptcy. And they just do this. They just that's like a life for them. They live high on the hog during the boom years and then declare bankruptcy and don't live very well during the bust cycle. And it's like, Well, why would you not just save your money? Why would you go and obligate yourself for all of this stuff, knowing that at some point, what goes up must come down. So I hope sincerely that you did not listen to those bullshit artists and the hot air and hopium crowd telling you that the great resignation would last forever. You could quiet quit and never face any consequences for it. And I'm not telling you to sell your soul to accompany I'm not telling you that any of this is right or it's good or it's correct. I'm thinking back to Public Enemy. No, we're not the same because we don't know the game. If you're going to survive this, you better figure out what the game is and how to play it. And if you're sitting there saying I'm just gonna do f all at my desk and wait to get fired, it's your choice to do that. My question back to you is where are you going to go once you get fired? That's food for thought. I'll read again from The Guardian. There were the quiet quitters, who proudly and publicly admitted that even though they were collecting a paycheck from their employer, they weren't doing much at all during the day, except looking for another job. And then there's the group of workers who were advocating for bare minimum Mondays because apparently a five day workweek was just too much to bear. During the past few years, we've heard employees publicly demand unlimited paid time off for day work weeks wellness sabbaticals, gigantic bonuses to switch jobs, and even paternity leave. Getting time off when you adopt a puppy facing labor shortages, customer demands and supply chain headaches. Most employers cave, the age of the worker blossomed in quote, would we really call that the age of the worker? I don't think so. In comparison to the amount of power and money and control that's possessed by corporate America, I mean, employees had a brief moment in the sun. But that's about it. I think that and I want to be careful how I say this. There's so many different sort of Molotov cocktails in this episode that I already know I'm gonna get hate mail for. Part of the problem here is that we live in a time of zero privacy. People want to go on social media and make all of these announcements for clout. And to me, that is so dumb. I guess as an actor, I just don't get it. Because that just simply wasn't an auction in the 80s and 90s. And thank God, you think I want everybody knowing some of the crazy shit we did when I was a teenager? Hell, no, no, no, no, no. If you weren't there, it never happened. You don't need to know. We did some dumb stuff. I remember there was this guy that I dated in high school. And I may have told this story before, I don't remember. But his mom had had this couch that she wanted him to take to the Salvation Army or to the goodwill and go get a tax receipt. Well, instead of doing that, he and some of his guy friends took this couch down to a creek bed and blew it up. And you just know like kids nowadays doing ignorant crap like that would totally film it and want it to go viral. Just god, I'm so glad we didn't live in that age. But it's like, Why the need to get on social media and make a public proclamation saying I'm going to do nothing today and get paid for it. Or I'm just going to phone it in every Monday from now on because I just don't feel like being there. I sort of think maybe, for me as an extra raised by baby boomers. It became clear to me after I got out in the work world, you just don't do that. You don't tell people Will I'm having a To hell with it day. I don't feel like doing jack shit. I didn't sleep well last night, I've got a headache, I've got a stomach ache. I'm here because I don't want to use a vacation day or this company is janky and it won't give me sick leave. But I don't want to be here, you'd kept that information to yourself. Maybe you told your best friend or your spouse or somebody but you didn't go in and like announced a god and everybody, I don't want to be here. I'm gonna do the bare minimum and you've got to pay me because I showed up. Who does that. I wish that there had been a better level of discretion. If you're having it to hell with that date, believe me, you can keep that to yourself. You don't need to announce it to corporate America so that they will further put a boot on the back of your neck. I'll read again that age is at sunset the economy has slowed no shit costs have risen and capital is drying up all button and say that is going to get even worse as lending tightens. As we have credit freezes and banks just say we can't lend the money right now. If you need a refresher on what happens when the banks say that please go back and revisit 2008 2009 Because it happened then to our economy is so based on QE easy money turning on the printing press the Fed just doling out fiat currency like candy, that it does not react well to QUE TE and to turning the printing press off. So if you need a refresher, just remember what it was like during the Great Recession. Companies are now being forced to do what they need to do to maintain profits and please their shareholders. And that's something is always the same cut some heads in quote, said a mouthful there to me. Think back to the scene in Wall Street have blogged about it before where Gordon Gekko crashes the TLDR paper shareholders meeting and he gives this big pompous speech about greed is good greed, greed filters through everything, it cuts out the detritus. Oh, okay. Yeah, of course it does, Gordon, but I've warned you I don't even know how many times these companies do not answer to you and me. They answer to the Board of Directors, the investors and the shareholders but they don't answer to us. If you're not a shareholder, if you're not some big important poobah in that company, they don't answer to you, and they don't give a damn. They don't. And have you also noticed and maybe you haven't, maybe you haven't. And so allow me to introduce you to this concept. Have you noticed that whenever they do that, whenever they please the shareholders and they cut some heads and they have a layoff, the stock goes up. Connect the dots. It's not an unrelated thing. I'll read again. In just the past few months, Google's parent alphabet cut 12,000 jobs Salesforce cut 10% of its global staff, Amazon eliminated 27,000 workers, Disney got rid of 7000 people and Accenture terminated 19,000. Accounting Firm Ernst and Young reduced workers by 3000, FedEx announced that 10% of its global workforce are being shipped out. Dow lost 2000 people and three and fired 8500 workers. And these are just the big companies making the news. Lift fired 1000 workers and ordered the remaining ones back to the office. There are countless other examples of companies both big and small, either cutting workers or freezing their hiring plans and quote, yes, yes. Now that paragraph absolute Absolutely. Think about the smaller mom and pop shops, small and medium regional type firms. You're never going to hear about layoffs. Unless you happen to see somebody on Facebook or LinkedIn posting about it, you're never going to even know that it happened. See, that's the thing the mom and pop shop down the street with 12 employees. If they let go of four of them. That's a substantial headcount reduction, but it's never going to make the nightly news. Yet it still tells you about the pulse of the economy. According to Google Trends, keyword searches for quiet quitting and bare minimum Mondays have decreased by more than 90%. I warned you about that too. Whenever I saw this public Foofa raw about a bare minimum Monday. I wrote a blog post back in February titled The MSM out here trying to get you fired. I read this information about the bare minimum Monday and how it was trending, be productive while taking it easy. And I thought this sounds like stellar advice. during a recession and mass layoffs. I now don't give you advice and I don't tell you what to do. But I sure as shit wouldn't do that. I didn't do that during the Great Recession. I know that I would never have just gone into the job that I had and been like, Screw it. I'm just gonna, it's whatever. I think I think part of what's going On here is such a disconnect between reality and social media bullshit. People are watching tick tock, which, you know, is that an engine of manipulation and propaganda, you be the judge, Judge for yourself cockadoodledoo like going up? They're watching Social Media and they're listening to influencers and bullshit artists, and they're not paying attention to the actual data. So it's like, well, yeah, okay, and the in the middle of economic freefall I'll say that I'm quiet quitting, I'll do bare minimum Mondays and announce it to the world on social media, why the hell not? employees aren't hearing it either. Meanwhile, as I've written previously, robotics, AI and other automation technologies that companies big and small, are permanently replacing workers at a breakneck pace. I'll scroll down just a little bit. Back are tougher performance reviews at meta and Salesforce based on Well, actual performance. More employers than ever are now implementing surveillance software to actually document how hard their employees are working from home when they say they're working from home. I've warned you about every bit of this. I was on the leading edge of warning you about Zuckerberg in the pips. The old performance improvement plan, set a goal so high so lofty that maybe Jesus could obtain it, but a human being could not. And then well, sure, sorry about you, Bob, we gave you every chance in the world, we put you on a corrective action plan, you just couldn't do it. So we're gonna have to let you go. The other alternative is Bob looks at it and says, Oh, God, I'll never do this. And then he just finds another job on his own and he leaves. And then they don't even have to backfill the position. They'll just say, well, the employee left we didn't need him anyway, so we'll just leave the position unfilled. And they're not on the hook for unemployment that way. Corporate America, believe me when I tell you they know all the loopholes. They know all the tricks. I'll continue to read. Does any of this surprise a business owner like myself? Nope. Throughout the pandemic, we watched his employees raged against and demonize their employers, and they had success. Employers hunkered down and opened up their wallets because what uh, what other choice did we have? But if there's one thing that an experienced business owner knows is that everything is cyclical employees had their day now the pendulum has swung back. He even use the same analogy, did he not? I warned you about this. I really did. Sarah warned you. I hope that you listened. I'll read the last paragraph. For workers. I know I sound harsh. So please consider this is tough love advice. The economy has slowed. You've lost your leverage. But like any asset, like any asset, if you're providing a good return on investment for your employer, you should have nothing to worry about. So are you? Yeah, I mean, for me, everything in that last paragraph is pretty vomitus. I think for me, instead of providing tough love or corporate propaganda masquerading as tough love, perhaps I don't know. And that's what this is. I'm not sure. But I would rather just warn people put the information out there and say you do with this what you will, it's information for your decision making it's information for your entertainment, you have to make your own decisions. I told you that the economy was slowing down a long time ago, I warned you that we were already in a recession, I warned you that you would lose leverage as an employee or a job seeker, either one. Once the great resignation ended, and I warned you that the great resignation was not gonna go on forever. I don't even know how many times I dropped a link to that intercept article about the leaked Bank of America memo, we want conditions to get worse, we hope conditions get worse for the average worker, we want to take their power away. Bank of America is not like some little small organization nobody ever heard of. When you're talking about the banks and Wall Street and these huge corporations, they have so much power. I really hate thinking of people, human beings as assets. You have to provide some kind of exchange. That's that's probably how I would phrase it. If the employer says I'm going to pay you this salary in order for you to do X, Y, and Z. If you don't do X, Y and Z that you agreed to do when you took the job offer, then you're not holding up your part of the bargain. On the other side of things, let's say that the company hired you to do Do XY and Z you agree to it and they agreed to pay you a salary and they stopped paying you? Well, they're not holding up their end of the bargain. Clearly. We are in a time where people are free agents and they know it. I think a lot of people have debunked this idea that corporate America cares. And they're going to do everything they can to keep you on, they'll fire you or lay you off at the drop of a hat if it suits them and they don't care. What you have to be careful with here is saying, Okay, well, I don't care either. Because I feel like you don't want to get into the territory of not caring about yourself, not caring about your health, and well being not caring about your ability to keep food on the table. Because it's all fun and games, until that pink slip shows up at your desk, or until you get fired. And you're turned down on a job market that absolute freakin literally sucks. It's my sincere hope that anybody listening to this broadcast avoids that exact scenario being tossed out onto the ice of Gotham, and realizing there's not much out here to choose from. And I wish I could go back in time and make different choices. I have warned you, I've put this message out, I've been way ahead. And I'm not going to be falsely modest or shy and saying so I have been way ahead of anything in the mainstream media on this information. I care about people, I want you to succeed in life, I want you to have a good life. I don't want anybody to starve. I don't want anybody to get in evicted, foreclosed upon have the car repoed have nowhere to go with your kids, et cetera. I don't want that for anybody. I don't. And so I hope that you, I hope you've listened, I hope that you've made whatever provisions that you can and you've planned ahead, you have that RTO survival plan, you have that job loss survival plan, you have some ideas about what you would do in the event of another great recession. You have some game plans in place you you've done what you can do. Beyond that, we just we hope we pray we trudge ahead, I would encourage you to stay informed stay ahead of ever changing trends. In the very first episode of this podcast I talked about don't wait for somebody else to anoint you. Now I'm not talking about going and misrepresenting yourself saying you're a medical doctor when you're not are saying you're a lawyer or a CPA, when you're not, don't do that. Let's say that you are an amazing software engineer and you know that you are you know that you've got mad skills, you know that you outperform your peers. You don't have to wait for somebody else to come up, you know, like the like royalty knighting somebody tapping you with the sword. You don't have to wait for somebody else to come up and say you're really an amazing software engineer. It feels good when they do but anoint yourself, hold your head high and carry yourself with pride. You don't have to wait for somebody else to anoint you. And on that note, I was having a conversation the other day with a friend and I said, I really wish that I could get my message out to a broader audience. I just don't feel like there's a place for me in mainstream media anywhere because I am not willing to corporate shill and I'm not willing to follow some prescribed narrative. I don't want to be a neocon or a NEO lib because I'm not those things. And she said, yeah, it does seem like you have to follow a pigeonhole. Like you are the neocon so you say right wing things, and you're the Neo lib. And so you say left wing things. And there's not much room for somebody who doesn't fit that profile. It's like if they can't categorize you into some neat, tidy package, they're not even interested. And I said, Yeah, that's definitely what I've seen. And I laughed, and I said, it's almost like I need to just start my own platform. And what began as almost a throwaway joke, I really took that and I ran with it. So I have launched my own site called the job market journal. I'll drop a link in the right up to this episode, hopefully, by the time that this episode reaches the airwaves, any kinks in the water hose if there's anything I need to do as far as site upgrades, hopefully all of that will be finished. But you can find job related information and articles there. I intend at least on an occasional basis to be publishing information that is exclusive to that website. And I will let you know when I do that. There has to be a place where people can go to try to get some help to try to seek the truth. I don't ever claim to have some cult leader godlike knowledge of things. Believe me, I don't I make mistakes all the time. My goal is to get as close to the truth as we possibly can to prepare ourselves and to be ready in the face of all of this turmoil. Stay safe, stay sane, stay informed, and I will see you in the next episode. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. We'll see you next time.